XMAS FUN

 20 years ago was my first Xmas party at GAJ. A few of us had decided to get a little band together and perform a handful of songs at the party. That was the birth of GAJ rocks which went through several iterations over the years.

The last of these was a three piece called "out of the Blue" which was no longer just an Office band. When that line up fell apart I did a couple of solo gigs but gradually the momentum dissipated.

So yesterday was a special moment for me. To get up at this year's Xmas party and strut my stuff. Well I don't have the full repertoire of moves any more, but it sure felt good and the audience response was great.

So two pictures, 20 years apart, and a host of memories in between. Such a blessing to have had music in my life.

 

I've been advocating the use of what I call a "BIM sketch" for many years, as a way to explore the history of buildings : how they are constructed, how to interpret them within a given historical and social context, what accounts for their aesthetic appeal, and so on.

This is Bradlows furniture store, a land mark modernist work in Central Harare (known as Salisbury in 1937 which is the date on the East elevation. There is a hint of Art Deco, which was quite popular in the country at that time, but predominantly it leans into the International Style of Corb and Mies, expressing the structural frame and grouping windows into horizontal bands.

I don't know how far I will take this and to be honest I don't have enough information to do a thorough job. Realistically I'm not going to be able to visit the building in the foreseeable future, if ever. I have been inside but it was before digital cameras, never mind smart phones, so all I have is vague memories.

Let's see how far this goes, but I'm learning quite a lot already.

 

. . . Two of my children are in Dubai with their spouses and my youngest grandchild. Finally I got to visit the Museum of the Future. The building itself is hugely impressive, especially in its outside form. The exhibits however were a big disappointment.

Probably many visitors have a different impressions, and that's fine. But to me they lack the wow factor that you would expect in Dubai and from all the hype around this project. I don't know what I was expecting. I'm certainly not pretending that I could have done a better job. But I do think that building itself deserved a better job from the team that imagined the storyline behind the permanent exhibition.

 

I have lived here for more than 20 years, and Dubai is a beacon of hope in a troubled region. Far from perfect, of course, but i am rarely impressed by the arguments of it's most vocal critics. This is a city that has been very kind to me and to around 3 million other non-Emeratis who make up the bulk of its population.

 

The Dubai way is to dream big and to live at peace with people of different faiths and nationalities. It's success is partly underpinned by a willingness to come down rapidly and heavily on troublemakers , undocumented migrants, criminals etc. Perhaps it's too harsh, but I for one am grateful for the safety and success of this remarkable city.

A very merry Xmas to all my friends around the world. I love you all.

 

 

DIAGRAMS UNLEASHED

 

We were developing technical education for secondary schools in post-independence Zimbabwe. I had taught building for a couple of years at an experimental school based at a former white farm. Primarily bricklaying but trying to infuse the lessons with problem-solving and visual skills.

Then I moved into curriculum development, writing textbooks and teachers notes. Finally I ended up at the university running an upgrade course for building teachers. I had to invent my own course and the best technology available was an overhead projector. So I spent evenings and weekends creating transparencies just to stay one step ahead of my students.

These two slides are trying to broaden their thinking about doors and windows. Rote learning was the norm in Zimbabwean schools and "this is the way we do it here" set the boundaries for the most part.

So I summoned up some of my own very hands-on experience of a different approach to door frames. The old-fashioned way of fitting timber frames into completed openings as opposed to pressed metal frames, built in as the work progresses.

Then there is an attempt to show that doors and windows belong to a much broader range of "openings" that have different functional properties and contexts. Technology evolves. It has a history and it varies from place to place.

Use a building course to open up the world to young minds, not to just channel them into a trade.

 

 

Another transparency from 1988 when I was running a Bachelor of Education course at the University of Zimbabwe. This was a module called Architectural Studies which began with a general History of Architecture overview, then reviewed a hundred years of buildings in Harare, drawing heavily on Peter Jackson's book.

Bradlows was a breakthrough building in Harare. The first unabashedly modern structure in the town centre. Before this everything had been some variant of classicism or Art Deco. It was 1938 and the architect was Lynn Driver-Jowett, who later went into partnership with Frank Lincoln.

 

So the building is 85 years old, and my sketch of it 35. I guess I can claim to be a link back to the era of Modernism that is fast fading. Of course, Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) was 10-15 years behind Europe in trying out Modernism. When I moved there in 1981, the same could be said about many aspects of life. It was kind of like stepping back in time, and that appealed.

The collage comprises two views from Google Earth and a drawing by one of my students. I am hugely proud of the work they did when challenged to go out and research for themselves. I had hoped to stay there several years and build up a significant body of original student research, but the fates thought otherwise.

All the same I hope that a new generation of Zimbabwean architecture enthusiasts will find posts like this valuable.

 

Papers from almost 50 years ago. I was a young idealist, "dropout", dreamer. I had completed a first degree in architecture, but spent the second half of that course playing at being a rebel. I hung around in London for another year, living on the margins, squatting, drawing political cartoons, imagining a radical new world in my head.

Then I moved back up North, to Sheffield with a group of friends. Started doing building work and playing music. At times I would sit in the reference library, exploring knowledge at random, making notes and diagrams. Most of my ideas took a visual form.

 

 

 
I was very naive of course, painfully so in retrospect. But happily, I didn't get swept up in anything violent or destructive, although I met people who learned that way. One diagram here shows ideas moving along in a linear way, parallel lines, followed by a perturbation that leads to an explosion of creativity. A kind of magical thinking, a lack of historical perspective, unaware of how lucky I was to live in a society of freedom and plenty.

There were explorations of musical patterns, topology, oriental rugs, tessellation, knots and knitting. I loved to draw crazy things for young children, and slowly my focus was shifting towards learning practical skills. Although I had abandoned architecture as an office job, I couldn't escape a fascination with buildings. How they are made, why they differ from place to place.

Eventually this obsession would give me the sense of historical perspective that I had lacked and a great respect for the cultural heritage we inherit.

 

 

HAND SKETCH - BIM SKETCH (50 YEARS)

 

I'm discarding old notebooks after digitising selected pages. I have always had a habit of doodling in a lecturer or meeting when my attention wanders. That's the one thing I miss about meetings. I don't seem to doodle quite as much as I used to.

The eye of Horus was inspired by listening to Jordan Peterson on a podcast. Probably done afterwards. I play podcasts in the background when I'm working on my laptop, so there's no scope for doodling really. I was quite taken with the idea that the eye symbol was about paying attention, really paying attention. It reminded me of a clip I saw of David Hockey talking about his working process and his ability to see things in "the everyday" that are really fresh.

 

 

I was also thinking about Iain McGilchrist and his notion of different modes of attention : fine detail and broad brush. Right brain, left brain. Parallel processing. Meanwhile I was modeling a festoon, or swag. Flowers and fruits strong up on temple walls on holy days. Then at some point carved in stone. How to evoke that simply in Revit?

Well you start by doodling it, then you doodle it again. Hand and eye, focus on fine detail. Meanwhile the back of your mind is reprocessing, seeing the big picture, laying the ground work.

As for the cartoon faces, I've been doing those for sixty years. Just start drawing. Winging it. See what comes out. Exercising the visual thought buds.

 

This post by my good friend Alfredo Medina is turning into quite a detailed thread. A celebration of the newly restored Notre Dame de Paris and a record of our work using Revit and other digital tools to explore it's history. That was a wonderful example of using the open source principle across a truly global group of collaborators.

I'm still going through old papers, digitising what I can. Slimming down the body. Slimming down the worldly possessions. Those are key goals at this point in my life.

One set here dates from my first degree at the Bartlett School, UCL. I was more interested in the counter-cultural vibe of London than the taught courses, but design projects were also good.

I did try to do a bit of research into the practicalies of building from time to time. That manhole drawing is quite prophetic. A few years later I built some manholes in my bricklaying phase. We had a visiting lecturer from Germany who was a bit of a pioneer in tension structures which were quite a new development. A group of students from the year above me built one in the UCL quad. Wish I had photos of that.

The lecture on history of various building technologies fascinated me and remains influential. OK so technology evolves. Just how does that work?

 

The other images date from 1987 (16 years later) I was now a lecturer at University of Zimbabwe and these are my original drawings for a discussion of steel window and door frames and detailing them for the conditions and common practices of Zimbabwe at the time.

A mixture of observation and invention. I've always been like that.

EVENTS TO REMEMBER

 

The clubhouse itself is probably Brian Johnson's best known design. It features on the Emerati 20 Dirhams note. Back in the day my office band played several gigs there. Very special memories.

I count myself very fortunate to have been part of this remarkable practice for more than 20 years now and leading the BIM initiative for most of that time. Brian has many skills. His design sense and ability to manage clients impressed me very early on. Clients can be their own worst enemies at times but he can usually steer them away from the rocks.

 

 

But the biggest takeaway from last night is the team spirit that he has cultivated at GAJ over the years. The work environment in Dubai can be quite harsh, but the atmosphere at GAJ has always been very positive.

Thanks to everyone there for contributing to a great evening.

 

Well this is interesting. Sorting through my old diary folders on Onedrive, I came across my tenth anniversary at GAJ. So half-way through the Dubai adventure with all its ups and downs.

To mark that milestone I was allowed to choose a set of key players from my BIM team and take the out for lunch. As it turned out this was my last "all you can eat" splurge before I was hit by a diabetes diagnosis and catapulted along a crash diet to lose 33kg in 18 months.

Apart from my huge stomach, the memorable feature about this group photo is those faces. People who I was very proud to know. Quite diverse in background, personality and role, but each one a star performer in their own right. Apart from me, they have all moved on to success with other companies. More power to them.

Soon after this I embarked on a series of "BIM breakfast" talks. It was a monthly event, and my first effort was entitled "seven stages of a BIM addict" Where do creative thoughts come from? I was not a natural performer, either as a musician or a public speaker, but I forced myself to try and somehow I discovered surprising and spontaneous talents within myself.

As an aside, I have just embarked on another radical restructuring of my diet to reverse the gradual upward slide of the last couple of years. The diabetes has not yet come back, but all the same I need to lose 10kg to get back to a healthy weight before I retire.